Artists' Biographies
This information is courtesy of Dr. Stephen Feinstein, curator of the exhibition.
1. Edith Altman. Altman is a Chicago-based installation artist. Her family escaped from Germany during the late 1930s and settled in Chicago. Altman is known for her complex installation works that are based on the Kabbala, the works of Jewish mysticism. She is interested in the process of healing the world after the Nazi era and has exhibited extensively, including in Germany.
2. Robert Barancik. Barancik is a successful graphics designer from Philadelphia. Kvitl Shoah was the result of an art retreat in Vermont, where it turned out that many artists were thinking and doing work about the Holocaust. His company, The BLAKE +BARANCIK Design Group, received the Art Direction Magazine "Creativity '89" award in 1989. Barancik's photo collages were exhibited in Moscow during Spring, 1990 and later in the New York Public Library, The CooperHewitt Museum, Zurich Museum of Art and Temple University Library.
3. Gerda Meyer Bernstein was born in northern Germany and rescued through the Kindertransport (children's transport) to England in 1939. She now lives and works in Chicago. Her powerful installations evoke strong emotions of the political issues in which she is engaged. For her, the Holocaust is the springboard for understanding other forms of oppression. Represented by the Fassbender Gallery in Chicago, she has exhibited extensively across the United States and in her native Germany.
4. Susan Erony. Born in the United States, Erony developed an intense interest in photographing the residue of Nazi Germany's corporate structure. This led her into an investigation of race and genocide through art, and the Holocaust. She lives in Boston and is an adjunct professor at SUNY-Albany.
5. Judith Goldstein. Born in Lithuania and a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto, Goldstein lives in New Rochelle, New York, and constructs collages and watercolors that attempt to work through some of the pain and trauma of her experience in the Ghetto and Stutthof Concentration Camp. She describes her work as seeing the world as when she was a child, with frightful images around her. Goldstein has taped her experiences for the Spielberg project as well as the Fortunoff Archive at Yale University. She is a member of the Marmaronek Artist Guild and has exhibited at many galleries in the United States. Goldstein is also a musical composer and is a lecturer on musical and literary issues.
6. Pearl Hirshfield is a Chicagoborn installation artist who has had an active career in political issues. In 1982 she organized the Midwest Arts festival. Her installations deal with cutting-edge political questions, such as the First Amendment and the arts, gender issues and the arts, the memory of the Holocaust, racism in America and police brutality. An associate of the writer Studs Terkel, Hirshfield has embraced many causes that speak to the basic issues of freedom and equality in the American landscape.
7. Kitty Klaidman was born in Sastin, Czechoslovakia, and survived the Holocaust hidden by a Christian family. Educated at the City University of New York, her work since the early 1990s has focused more on the memories of her Holocaust experiences, stemming from a visit back to Sastin to meet the with family that helped rescue her own. She has exhibited extensively in the United States, England, Germany, Spain, and France.
8. Mauricio Lasanksy. Born in Argentina, Lasansky came to the United States in 1943 with a Guggenheim Foundation grant and worked at Atelier 17 in New York with Stanley William Hayter, Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollack, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz and the Chilean-born surrealist Matta. He is now a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa in Iowa, City. His most famous series is The Nazi Drawings, displayed at the Whitney Museum of Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1965-66. These may be seen at the University of Iowa Museum. The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art is dedicated to three Iowa artists: Grant Wood, Marvin Kone, and Mauricio Lasansky. A wide array of his works may be seen there on permanent display, including the entire Kaddish series.
9. Joyce Lyon is a child of refugees from Poland and a professor of art at the University of Minnesota. Primarily a landscape painter, Lyon became interested in landscape as a metaphor for absence and the memories of the Holocaust in her family. She has exhibited extensively around the United States and her works are held in many private collections.
10. Samuel Bak is a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto and major surrealist painter recognized internationally. Bak has lived in Israel and Switzerland, and now resides in the Boston area. His work has been displayed at major museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and South America. Many examples of his paintings may be seen at Pucker Gallery, 171 Newberry Street, Boston, MA. 02116.
11. Larry Rivers. Born in the United States of RussianJewish parents, Rivers has been a major member of the New York School of Art since the 1950s and was also a member of FLUXIS. A biography has been written about Rivers by Samuel Hunter, and his new works are handled by the Marlborough Gallery in New York. Although most of Rivers' works are expressionistic with repetition of imagery and tromp l'oeil techniques, Rivers has also been influenced by the recent Jewish past, impelling him to do many works that reflect on Jewish history and the Holocaust.
12. Gabrielle Rossmer came as a child to the United States from Bamberg, Germany. Educated at the Massachusetts College of Art and known as a sculptor, Rossmer began to become more involved with conceptual spaces in the late 1980s. Her works have been shown in many American museums, through the Goethe Institute in Germany, and in her native city of Bamberg, Germany.
13. Shirley Samberg is an Americanborn sculptor from Roslyn Heights, NY. Educated at Pratt Institute and Queens College, Samberg's sculptures represent a wide range of expression. Lately her work has focused more on issues of human suffering and the Holocaust. She has participated in exhibitions in the United States, Sweden, Poland, China, Israel, and most recently, Japan.
14. Art Spiegelman. Wellknown cartoonist and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his book MAUS: A Survivor's Tale, Spiegelman started as a cartoonist for RAW MAGAZINE (a comic book) and continues to deal with cartoons as his prime means of artistic expression. He is currently a cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine. Spiegelman's parents were both Holocaust survivors from Poland.
15. Debbie Teicholz is a child of Holocaust survivors from Hungary and a graduate of New York University's Film program. A photographer with intense interest in the Holocaust, she has exhibited extensively in the United States and in Israel. She now lives in New Jersey.
16. Arnold Trachtman. Born in the United States and a professor of art at Harvard University, Trachtman is wellknown for his incisive paintings and his critique of contemporary sociopolitical landscapes. His major works deal with the more subtle aspects of Nazism, especially corporate culpability.
17. Nettie Vanderpol was born in Amsterdam, and during the War was deported to a camp in Terezin, Czechoslovakia. Vanderpol was a classmate of Anne Frank in 1940. She was deported from Terezin as part of an exchange for German prisoners of war in early 1945, the only such exchange of the war. Her medium is needlepoint and her collected work is entitled "Every Stitch a Memory," dedicated to her experiences and memories of the Holocaust. A major retrospective of her work took place at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, 1993.
18. Mindy B. Weisel. Born in the BergenBelsen DP (Displaced Persons) camp after World War 11 and the Holocaust, Weisel now lives in Washington, DC, and is an adjunct professor at the Corcoran Museum of Art School of Art. Her paintings have been exhibited extensively around the United States, and she is represented in the permanent collections of the Hirschorn Museum in Washington, DC, the Jewish Museum of New York, Yad VaShem in Jerusalem, and other collections.
19. Jerome Witkin. Born in the United States, Witkin was educated at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Cooper Union, the Berlin Academy and the University of Pennsylvania. Known for the realism in many of his works, Witkin has often depicted the Holocaust and other aspects of contemporary violence in his works. He is a professor of art at Syracuse University and has been in more than one hundred exhibitions since 1966.
20. Jeffrey Wolin. Born in the United States and educated at Kenyon College and The Rochester Institute of Technology, Wolin is now a professor of photography at Indiana University in Bloomington. His photographs have appeared extensively in magazines and professional journals. He is represented in the permanent collections of many museums and in 1996 had a major exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. His works may be seen through the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago.
21. Pier Marton. Born in France of parents who were in the French Resistance in World War 11, Marton is now a professor of film at Washington University in Saint Louis. His films explore television imagery and text, issues of male selfidentification, violence and general conditioning, and the memory of the Holocaust among children of survivors. His works are shown in museums around the United States as well as in Europe.
22. Marlene Miller. Educated at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Tyler School of Fine Arts, Marlene Miller recently retired as Professor of art from Sellersville State College. Her artistic works involve both feminist issues and the Holocaust. She is also a puppetmaker, which informed her work in Witness and Legacy.
23. Alice Lok Cahana, a Holocaust survivor born in Budapest, Hungary, was an inmate in Auschwitz, Birkenau, Guben and Bergen-Belsen camps. She studied in Israel, Sweden, and later at universities in Texas, where she now lives. Known for her abstract works which have in recent years reflected more and more on her experiences in the Holocaust, Cahana has been exhibited extensively in the United States and Israel. She is the subject of a 1995 PBS Baltimore video, "Triumph of the Spirit," and was recognized by President Clinton at the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in 1995. She is also featured in the movie, "The Last Days," produced by Steven Spielberg and the Sho'ah Foundation.
24. Seth Kramer is a young filmmaker from West Orange, New Jersey. His work, Untitled, was shown originally in the Jewish Museum exhibition, "TOO JEWISH," curated by Norman Kleeblat. Kramer's work reflects the growing interest in the Holocaust as a subject, especially as it has become Americanized through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and attempts to convey the story through Hollywood's films.